FOR WE SO LOVED OUR DYING-AND-RISING GODS
Meanwhile, among pagans, genuine sons of god who had to be murdered, buried, and then miraculously resurrected from the dead in order to judge and rule from heaven on high as our divine saviors were actually a common fad of the time, not a shocking novelty at all. Osiris and Romulus were widely worshipped to the tune of such sacred stories demonstrably
before
the rise of Christianity, and similar stories surrounded other dying-and-rising gods long before such as Zalmoxis, Adonis, and Inanna.
13
And there were probably others (of whom evidence only barely survives).
Indeed, resurrection was wildly popular among the pagans. Of course, it was already a common Jewish staple, with past resurrections in its sacred stories and future resurrections in its imagined plan of salvation. But the claim that all pagans scoffed at the idea is simply false. The idea of a future resurrection for all the saved actually derives from pagan Zoroastrianism, then the Persian state religion, which had influenced many popular cults in the Roman Empire (including Mithraism and religious Stoicism). Indeed, it's from them that the Jews got the idea in the first place, having picked it up when they were in captivity in Persia several centuries before Christianity began.
But that wasn't the limit of it. Besides the many popular resurrected savior gods already mentioned, pagan tales of other resurrected heroes, gods, saints, and just-plain-lucky lads were incredibly common.
14
One very popular example at the time: not only was “the savior” Asclepius a resurrected and deified son of god, but he was also the preeminent “resurrector of the dead,” which was in fact a prominent reason pagans held him in such esteem. Since the ancient Christian apologist Justin could not deny this, he was forced to insist “the devil” must have introduced “Asclepius as the raiser of the dead” in order to undermine the Christian message in advance.
15
Clearly, pagans would have no problem with one more dying-and-rising son of god and savior. That notion was actually conspicuously
popular
at the time,
which is why Christians thought of it
and why it was at all successful. Even the claim that Jews would never have bought the idea of a singular resurrection before the general resurrection of all Jews is false: such special resurrections already appeared in their own Bible and were readily believed to still be occurring.
16
Even the future resurrection was often imagined as occurring in stages, which could include singular individuals (Adam, for example, was often thought to be the first to rise), and the earliest Christians taught that Jesus was indeed only the
first stage
of that general resurrection.
17
So Christian teaching was already right in line with popular Jewish thinking, and it was quite suspiciously tailor-made to fit right in with popular pagan belief, too. As the same Justin said (emphasis mine):
When we say that the Word, who is our teacher, Jesus Christ the firstborn of God, was produced without sexual union, and that he was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound
nothing new or different from what you believe
regarding those whom you consider sons of God.
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Nothing new or different. Translation: we packed our religion with every popular fad we could. Obviously, this is a natural recipe for success, not failure.
IT WAS NEW, IT WAS MORAL, IT WAS RADICAL
(IN OTHER WORDS, IT WAS TYPICAL)
You'll sometimes hear that the ancient mindset was openly hostile to “novelty” and new ideas, and that pagans were all drunken, orgy-loving rapscallions who would never deign to embrace an austere cult of high moral standards. But such claims have more to do with Hollywood than history.
In reality, Romans were often prudes by modern standards, and cults and philosophies promoting austere morals were commonplace. Judaism, as already noted, was far more austere than Christianity yet still won converts, and Christianity only made it easier. Indeed, Christians were practically party animals by comparison. Secular moral cults like Stoicism were fashionable, too. All the major evangelistic religions of the day promoted systems of morality that were just as restrictive as Christianity (even if in different ways). Moral doctrines were components of all the mystery cults like Mithraism and Isidism.
19
Even by the standards of popular fables and customs, Christian morality was not so far removed from what was already widely regarded as admirable and right, and the extent to which it went beyond, other non-Christian sects and philosophies had gone there, too. Indeed, for many the morals of Christian communities could even be attractive. At any rate, it was competing in a market already successfully mined by the same business model: morals and rules in exchange for eternal salvation. Christianity had tons of customers just waiting to be sold on the idea.
Ancient hostility to novelty, on the other hand, was more facade than fact.
20
In reality, novelty was popular and common—and ceaseless. New ideas, new philosophies, and new religions always spread like wildfire, never hindered at all by any supposed hostility to novelty. In part, this is because any new idea could be sold as an old one: just show how some revered ancient sages or texts already support or point the way to what's being sold now, and you no longer had a new idea but instead the perfection of an old one.
That's exactly how Christianity marketed itself. Even from the very beginning in the letters of Paul, and for centuries thereafter, every Christian text aimed at persuasion connects Christianity intimately and profoundly with the Jewish scriptures, regarded even by pagans as among the most ancient oracles of man. Christianity was never claimed to have been “founded” by Jesus—it was always claimed Jesus was merely the culmination of a divine plan that had been written down for millennia (Romans 16:25–26) by an ancient God whose worship many Romans respected precisely because the Jewish religion could claim such great antiquity.
It was in just this same way that the Romans so frequently found ways to paint the new as old that an endless stream of novel cults and philosophies came to permeate every inch of the empire, even despite resistance from some among the elite who found the unstoppable popularity of these novelties appalling. But unstoppable they were. No appeal to a Roman resistance to the “new” can argue against the natural success of Christianity. If dozens of other new cults and philosophies could succeed in spite of this, then so could Christianity. Especially since the most conspicuous elements of innovation in Christianity were already its most popular features: as already noted, it took the religion of Judaism, which was already winning converts from among the pagans, and made it even more attractive by making it far less onerous (in other words, making it far more
pagan
); and like modern Marxism (also once wildly popular despite stalwart elite hostility), it promised to subvert the most despised of elite values and produce an egalitarian utopia of justice for the common man, already a popular idea. Thus, even what really was new about Christianity was nevertheless exactly what would contribute to its success.
And then there's the fact that many of Christianity's supposed “innovations” were actually rip-offs of already popular ideas, such as a ritual ceremony of symbolically dying-and-rising and thus being “born again.” Such a ceremony and concept was already an established part of Isis cult. Likewise, faith healing and exorcism were already commonly practiced by Jewish holy men and pagan sorcerers and keepers of holy shrines; incarnate gods were a dime a dozen, as were gods who magically impregnated women and had sons by them. Even many Jews accepted the notion of God having sons and spiritually possessing them.
21
Again, incorporating already popular features in a new religion (especially when you could then sell this as the perfection of an old one) was a perfectly natural road to success.
YOU DON'T NEED EVIDENCE, YOU JUST NEED FAITH
Wouldn't it have been so easy to check and discover their claims were false? Actually, no. It would have been neither easy nor common. When we pore over all the documents that survive, we find no evidence that any Christian convert did any fact-checking before converting or even would have done so. We can rarely even establish that they
could
have, had they wanted to. There were people in antiquity who could and would, but curiously we have no evidence that any of those people converted. Instead, every Christian who actually tells us what convinced him explicitly says he
didn't
check any facts but merely believed upon hearing the story and reading the scriptures and just “feeling” it was right. Every third-person account of conversions we have tells the same story.
22
Likewise, every early discussion we have from Christians regarding their methodology for testing claims either omits, rejects, or even denigrates rational, empirical methods and promotes instead faith-based methods of finding secrets hidden in scripture and relying on spiritual inspirations and revelations, and then verifying all this by whether their psychosomatic “miracles” worked and their leaders were willing to suffer for the cause. Skepticism and doubt were belittled; faith without evidence was praised and rewarded.
23
It's no surprise such an approach would be “successful” because such an approach is purely psychological—it does not depend on any
actual
evidence.
Hence, when we look closely, we discover that all the actual evidence that Jesus rose from the dead consisted of unconfirmable hearsay, just like every other incredible claim made by ancient religions of the day.
24
Christian apologists make six-figure careers out of denying this, but their elaborate attempts always collapse on inspection. There just wasn't any evidence Jesus really rose from the dead other than the word of a few fanatics and a church community demonstrably full of regular hallucinators and fabricators. The only miracles Christians themselves could perform in public were some faith-healings and exorcisms and unremarkable bouts of prophesy—in other words, quite suspiciously,
only things that we know have natural causes
(being entirely cultural and psychosomatic phenomena).
25
Even if every public, checkable claim made by Christian missionaries were entirely true, it still cannot be concluded that their private, uncheckable claims were true as well; yet only the latter had any plausible claim to being supernatural. In the long run, once Christianity became centuries old, it was just one more religion packed with incredible claims no one could verify. And just as (once upon a time) all
those
cults could go on succeeding, often by exploiting social and political advantages that made joining them attractive, so did Christianity. Indeed, when it gained the despotic power to compel conversion and monopolize the society's wealth and education, its triumph was all but assured.
AND BLOOD IS OFTEN SEED
Surely the fact that the Romans tortured and killed Christians and ruthlessly hunted them all down would have made their success impossible but for divine intervention. Right? Wrong.
First, in actual fact, the Romans didn't “hunt them all down.” All reliable evidence confirms that persecution of Christians was limited, occasional, and sporadic at best. Most pagans didn't care about Christians or even aided and harbored them.
26
They are essentially just like the persecuted Jews throughout history. Hitler's regime alone killed far more Jews than Romans ever killed of Christians, yet Judaism thrives worldwide—so should we now all convert to Judaism? Medieval Christian pogroms against Jews were likewise as ruthless and horrifying as any pagan oppression of Christians had ever been (arguably, in some cases, even more so). Sporadic persecution just doesn't stop religions from growing and surviving. That's why Hitler had to dream up a Final Solution-the Interim Solution hadn't succeeded even after thousands of years of earnest effort. And yet, alas, even his Final Solution was really just the Final Failure to Have Any Effect at All. In the long haul, when it comes to zealous people and their devoted murderers, the villains tend to lose.
Second, the fact that believers are willing to die for their belief does not confirm their belief is true, since there have been willing martyrs for Judiasm, Islam, Buddhism, Marxism, even paganism, and many other religions and ideologies throughout history. In the right social conditions, such martyrdom doesn't even slow recruitment because such willingness to die is
normal
for such movements, not unusual. As W. H. C. Frend says of that time, “there was a living pagan tradition of self-sacrifice for a cause, a preparedness if necessary to defy an unjust ruler, that existed alongside the developing Christian concept of martyrdom inherited from Judaism.”
27
Christian martyrdom particularly made sense from a cultural and sociological perspective. Many sociologists studying world martyrdom movements have found they have a common social underpinning throughout history, from aboriginal movements in the New World to Islamic movements in the Middle East. For example, Alan Segal says that in every well-documented case a widespread inclination to martyrdom “is an oblique attack by the powerless against the power of oppressors,” in effect “canceling the power of an oppressor through moral claims to higher ground and to a resolute claim to the afterlife, as the better” and only “permanent” reward. “From modern examples,” Segal concludes, “we can see that what produces martyrdom,” besides the corresponding “exaltation of the afterlife,” is “a colonial and imperial situation, a conquering power, and a subject people whose religion does not easily account for the conquest.” Some of these subjects are “predisposed to understand events in a religious context,” and are suffering from some “political or economic” deprivation, or even a social or cultural deprivation (as when the most heartfelt morals of the subgroup are not recognized or realized by the dominating power structure).
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